Program Title
Lost Empires

Based On
The novel by J.B. Priestley

Adapted By
Ian Curteis

Number of Episodes:
7

Description
It is 1913. Looming on the horizon is the First World War. Richard Herncastle is a 20-year-old ledger clerk. At his mother's funeral, he meets his uncle, Nick Ollanton, a famous music hall illusionist who offers Dick a job as his assistant. The young man accepts, and is pitched into the tough, glittering world of the theatre, with its race of people such as he has never encountered before. Among them are four women who are to play a major part in his life, and in his true growing-up...


Original broadcast date
1987-01-25

Cast	Characters
Colin Firth	Richard Herncastle
Beatie Edney	Nancy Ellis
John Castle	Nick Ollanton
Laurence Olivier	Harry Burrard
Carmen du Sautoy	Julie Blane
Brian Glover	Tommy Beamish
Gillian Bevan	Cissie Mapes
Emil Wolk	Ricarlo
Rachel Gurney	Mrs. Agnes Foster Jones
Francesca McGregor	Nonie Colmar
Kenneth Nelson	Hank Johnson
Mike Edmonds	Barney
Jane Arden	Susie Hodson
Patricia Heneghan	Varvara Wall
Anthony Newlands	Hubert Courtenay
Lila Kaye	Rose Bentwood
Roy Barraclough	Alfred Bentwood
Pamela Stephenson	Lily Farris
Alfred Marks	Otto Mergen
Patricia Quinn	Doris Tingley
Matthew Solon	Alfred Dunsop
Arthur Hewlett	Mr. Pitter
Neil Boorman	Ben Hayes
Jim Carter	Inspector Crabbe
James Cosmo	Inspector Furness

Credits

Producer: June Howson
Director: Alan Grint

Intro
LOST EMPIRES/Episode 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke

Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Tonight we begin a seven-part dramatization of the last novel of J. B. Priestley, the famous Yorkshire novelist who died recently just into his nineties.

It's called Lost Empires and Priestley wrote it when he was seventy as he was looking back as old men will to the golden age of his youth. Well, perhaps not golden age--Priestley was sensible enough to know that when old men think back to the great days of their youth. More often then not what they're celebrating is not the times themselves, but youth itself. Youth, which George Bernard Shaw said, it's much too good to be wasted on the young.

So our drama is a long recollection of a time to which Priestley in old age said, I belong heart and soul to the pre-1914 North Country. And it's a wistful, comic tribute to the old English music halls, English vaudeville. The title, Lost Empires, if it had been written about this country, might have been called Lost Palaces because the Empire was the name usually given to the central vaudeville theatre, not only in London but also in the cities of the English provinces. Now our story begins with our hero, who is also the narrator. The young Yorkshireman's mother has followed his father into the grave and the young man is invited to join the vaudeville troupe of his Uncle Nick, a magician professionally known as Ganga Dun. We shall follow this troupe from the autumn of 1913 into the summer of 1914.

Now the story begins with a prologue or flash forward into the first year of the First World War when the whole country was wallowing in the confident, headlong patriotism seen in the music halls. And we come in on a famous singer, Vesta Tilley, singing a musical variation of wartime recruiting slogan: We Don't Want to Lose You, But We Think You Ought To Go.

Lost Empires, episode one.





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